Afterword

Kathleen Moran

Michael Rogin's essay began as a lecture in an American studies course that he and I cotaught for the last several years. It represents Michael's recent interest in the conjunction between Popular Front politics, the culture of mass consumerism, and classic Hollywood film, and it moves, characteristically, through a breathtaking array of arguments, readings, historical data, psychoanalytic insights, and political theory. As in so much of his writing, Michael's prose is densely packed, often unnerving, sometimes enraging. Every sentence is a demand, urging us to remember previous connections and register multiple entendres, signaling us that we need to keep track of each idea, each allusion, each metaphor. Miss one step and we may miss the point—and we will certainly miss the jokes.	1
At the heart of the essay is Michael's attempt to elucidate both the historical moment and the method—the political language and the psychic mechanisms—through which the brief alliance between mass culture and working-class struggle was achieved and simultaneously undermined. Michael points out that Hollywood's New Deal period opened and closed with films that connect the upheaval of a labor strike to symbolic incest. The denouements in both Preston Sturges's The Power and the Glory (1933) and The Devil and Miss Jones (1941) involve an old rich man and a young woman. Illicit sexual desire brings down the millionaire capitalist in the first case; it converts and redeems him in the second. But, for Michael, those outcomes do not simply illustrate the difference between tragedy and comedy. Both versions demonstrate how unconscious processes can appropriate and undermine progessive change. Both films testify to the power of desire and to the attraction of its conventionalized displacement, Hollywood sentimentality.	2
In his final footnote, Michael alerts readers to the "mood" of the essay, connecting his own family history with the brief (and ultimately doomed) moment of triumph for the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Both a celebration and a lament, Michael's essay mourns the loss of a politically progressive marriage between democratic working-class politics and popular culture and celebrates the brief historical period when such a union was possible, in spite of it all. In much of his writing over the years Michael discussed the forces of repression that line up to defeat democratic change. In this piece, he analyzes a "light and fluffy" film that offered, in his words, "guilt-free delight" to "CIO lovers" because he wants to decode the way audiences (even left-wing audiences) could be invested in that defeat.1	3
Michael's last footnote connected his study of labor movies to his parents' work in the labor movement. His first book disconnected the left-wing tradition of his parents from right-wing extremism. The Intellectuals and McCarthy compared the voting patterns of supporters of Joseph R. McCarthy with those of Progressives and Populists and argued that McCarthyism was not a mass movement grounded in agrarian reformism or populist protest, but rather could be explained by the specific agenda of conservative Republican activists and elites. The book won high praise from historians, and it revised the established view of McCarthyism. Michael once explained that his McCarthy book was "methodologically though not politically orthodox." His next book was neither. Turning to psychoanalysis to account for the history of Indian displacement and extermination, Fathers and Children demonstrated the importance of cultural myths and symbolic meanings for political actors and policy makers. Though it was controversial, Fathers and Children successfully shifted the issue of Indian removal from the margins of scholarly discussion of Jacksonian America to its center. The book also initiated what was to be Michael's most sustained intellectual project, namely, his effort to understand and expose the workings of political demonology.2	. . .